DrunkenBlog

Of gambling with software

One of the things I've been asked in a roundabout way this week is "Why, in the name of all that's holy" would I spend so much time writing up a little shareware game instead of using the time for something 'bigger' and giving it a plug as a footnote. There are a few reasons:

• If you go back through the archives, you'll see I often try to single out some little guy that's toiling in the corner doing cool things, especially when they're going so over the top. Hopefully it made the authors day, and is an encouragement to keep plugging.

• Others might see it and be encouraged to keep plugging, or to plug things that need plugging. While that writeup was about Lux, there was a lot of other stuff mixed into it also. You might pick up that while I'm talking about Lux in general, it was also a convenient means to an end. There are other people out there toiling to make good games for the Mac, and hopefully they're encouraged to see so much time spent on a little guy.

  When you're a small developer trying to give it a go, often times the hardest thing to deal with -- paycheck issues aside -- is the idea that no one is paying attention and the momentum to get them to pay attention can seem insurmountable. Basically, startups and small bands have everything in common but the pussy, everything else can be mapped to a commonality.

And it's not like games on the Mac are doing that well in general, with Aspyr all but confirming their cash flow issues earlier today. Anywho, at the end of the day, I go over the top like that because I've seen how completely awry a little software project can go, which is why we're going to be talking about Tiger's Eye Pub today.

It is quite possibly the worst game every created for the Mac, perhaps one of the worst apps in general, but it's hands-down the worst casino game I've ever seen.

There are two types of meditation that I'm aware of:

1. Where you do your best to try to empty your mind, in order to let the back of the mind do what it needs to do.

2. Where you focus on something short and repetitive, yet requiring concentration. While the front of the brain is occupied, the back of the brain is able to put itself in order. This is often speaking a mantra, or imagining something you're familiar with and going it in every detail.

Meditation can get a bad wrap -- mostly because it's easy to associate with people who are more interested in you knowing they're meditating than in actually doing it -- but it's actually very cool. It acts as sort of an etch-a-sketch for your brain, letting your subconscious work on problems or file away what you've taken in that day. Which is where games come in.

Different games vary, but most rely on short decisions and patterns you have to deal with immediately and quickly, as well as larger picture you have to keep in mind towards an end goal; tactics versus strategy.

There are variations, and many arcade games can seem to drop strategy altogether, but they don't really, they just make it a weaker element in the decision making process for that moment. I.E., if you are moving your player out of the line of fire, you need to make sure you aren't moving him into a worse situation in the back of your brain. You can probably see where I'm going here, as one of the things games can do is keep the front of your mind focused intently while the back of it is able to process other things and do what it needs to do.

Now, different games require a different level of mental commitment, and there is a big difference between playing an immersive game where you're constantly taking in new things and one that is more rules-based. The standard arcade games are great for this, but so are many of the standard casino games. Solitaire is a fantastic example.

Something like Texas Hold 'em isn't an ideal example, but there are levels to all these games. There are immediate decisions being made in poker, but so much of it comes from having to be acutely aware -- even subconsciously -- of the other players.

With something like Blackjack it's very different: It's all numbers, and the level of mental commitment is all front-brain. At its basics the rules are terribly simple, and even if you scale up to card counting -- where you keep track of what's been played to have a better idea of when to lay larger bets -- you're just using more front-side headspace.

Yes, I'm seriously arguing that many games are Zen, and can be a form of meditation, and even help structure your thought processes to better handle problems. This is different from the effect of say, washing the dishes or something else that's manual yet requires little conscious thought. It could well just be my rationalizing my ADD and what works for me, but I don't think so.

Either way, I like Blackjack and many of the other standard games, and went looking for some for the Mac.

I don't gamble, ever. I lived in Casino for the better part of a year for awhile, because the job required it and at the time no young man would ever turn an offer like that down, even if only for the stories he could take away. Let's just say the odds are against you. In every game.

Blackjack gives you some of the better odds -- to where the House edge is smaller than the others -- but even then unless you're counting cards and dragging it out you'll come away lighter. And if you're counting cards, you won't be playing long. It's all hedged in to where if you play long enough, you'll come away lighter eventually.

Now, gambling is immensely enjoyable. There's a moment while the wheel is spinning when your fortunes -- and life -- is completely in flux and on hold at the same time, and you only get that feeling when you really have something to lose on the line.

While I don't encourage it and promote it, I don't have a problem with anyone finding it an enjoyable way to spend their time, or their money, as long as they aren't liquidating their 401K or kid's tuition money or something. Still, it gives a lot of people a bad taste in their mouth, yet its really worth separating the act of gambling out from the games themselves.

I'm aware that I could just play Blackjack at some online casino somewhere but this presents a few problems:

• The clients that are tied into online play are generally Windows-only. I know people who use VirtualPC just to play Texas Holdem online. One of them develops software I'm using right now (Hint: duck icon), although I think he made himself delete it recently.

• The ones that are playable completely online -- via your web browser -- seem to have a habit of being very tied into ActiveX controls and such even if they're Java. Which means they often just don't work correctly on the Mac.

I've never had a gambling problem, but as mentioned earlier, when you recognize you have an obsessive and addictive personality, with it comes an awareness of what you should obviously stay away from at all costs.

Online casinos and such for my blackjack needs are a no-go, because while many offer standard fare, you're generally a click away from playing with real money. My needs are simple:

• Native to the platform, and not hooked into a casino's coffers, online or otherwise.

• Runs well, and is at least using a decent random algorithm for the shuffling. Seems obvious, but you'd be surprised at how non-random some of these things can be.

Which meant I had to start downloading...

Almost everyone knows this cycle. You need a class of software, so you go to somewhere like VersionTracker or MacUpdate, do a search, and download anything with a decent feedback rating.

Personally I think MacUpdate has a much better interface for the whole deal, but the guy who runs once berated me for "emailing him about serious matters using an alias instead of my real name", which means he had his bozo bit flipped and I always feel yucky using it. Anywho, once you get them all downloaded you decompress and install them -- hoping to gawd they aren't using .sit or VISE installers -- and then open them one by one to see what you dig and what you don't.

I know, I'm bashing .sit kinda hard, but it requires Stuffit Expander, and Stuffit Expander is freakin' wonky...

As usual, the guys at Freeverse don't disappoint with their craftsmanship, and their Burning Monkey Casino was at the top of my list, and then quickly dropped off it, because while I just dig their style immensely I'm not interested in:

• Having my entire screen taken over to play a game of blackjack.

• Having the fan on the Powerbook going because they're humping on the video card in a major way.

• Having Dock.app crash when I go out of full-screen mode.

Although that scratch-off game they included is just filler, and beneath them, Freeverse are one of the gems when it comes to software on the Mac -- even the stuff others do and they polish up for release. They just have style, even if it comes at pumping hard on the OpenGL.

The whole OpenGL thing was a major strike against using their product, because from what I can tell their casino game hasn't been updated in years. One of the reasons why I reinstalled 10.4 again was because of trying out another of their products, Solace, and noticing the Dock had an even or odd chance of dying whenever it quit (Not too surprising, remember the Dock.app controls everything dealing with UI in OS X) and wanted to be sure it had to do with Solace and not funkiness from my crashing it before.

I actually had it lock up my machine twice -- on a fresh install before I moved everything over -- while playing it after some time. This is one of my major problems with games and OS X, and OpenGL in general. After playing them for awhile in a session, they seem prone to being able to lock up the Window Server, which for all intents and purposes locks up your whole Mac.

I'm not kidding. Only two things will regularly lock up my Mac over long periods of time: The Official Bittorrent client, and full-screen OpenGL games. I remember going through hell with one of Aspyr's ports of Fallout because of this too, and now just avoid it.

Now, Mac OS X's OpenGL implementation is buggy and incomplete compared to other platforms (It becomes more complete with every point release -- which is why Doom 3 required 10.3.8), but while I know its the Window Server bailing out, I can't say for sure whose problem it is, because of the upgrade churn.

I.E., a vendor ships a game, and its hot for awhile, and they issue patches for awhile and if they're a solid company the product hopefully runs well. They've quelled the major bugs. After a longer while, sales slow and they move onto what they're selling now. Their older product is no longer new and hot, and since it brings in less revenue they put less resources towards it -- including patching.

On Windows, this isn't such a big deal but does need to be accounted for. WindowsXP has been out for forever, and the biggest change vendors (and consumers) have had to deal with since has been Service Pack 2. You do still have things to account for:

• The fact that vendors are more and more choosing to ship incomplete software -- and at a certain level of brokeness I think you're well approaching fraud -- and in today's competitive game market the onus is often to ship now and make it work later. All too often they're patching just to get what they sold you to work at all.

• New drivers from manufacturers -- I.E., NVIDIA, ATI, etc. One, and I'll leave it to you to research, is notorious for the quality of its drivers, and has gotten a really bad name for it which its still trying to claw out of. As new cards ship, and new drivers ship, your software may not interact well with them in a kosher way and you have to test and patch.

  This is a deal, but luckily not nearly as big a deal as it could be. It's a fairly straightforward and contained area to test, and video card manufacturers have gone out of their way in terms of backwards capability: Otherwise you would never upgrade your drivers, which means you'd never upgrade your video card. The game market is different on the PC than the Mac -- the amount of people still playing Quake 2 on the PC is extraordinary and you don't piss them off, because they're often going to be the ones first in line for a new video card and a Doom 3 box.

On the Mac, Apple has been releasing a new underlying OS about once a year until Tiger, and rumbles now say it'll be 18 months or so between releases. This is great for Teh Shiney™. Unfortunately, while Apple has been good about backwards compatibility in many APIs, a whole lot of them have been in flux, and for every bug fixed they seem to introduce two more.

Quake II exists for Mac OS X, although it wasn't brought over by Id Software or the original publisher (Activision, I believe), but rather a small group of people took advantage of the fact that Id had open sourced it and ported it themselves. They aren't really touching it anymore, and unfortunately, 10.4.2 and QuickTime 7 completely break sound in it. Chances are, it won't get fixed, and the chances are higher it won't be brought to MacTel, but I know people playing Quake II on a fully up to date Windows system easy as they please.

If that seems like way too old an example, Quake III Arena isn't doing well on G5s or shiny new OS X's, and while World of Warcraft does well on the Mac right now, who knows if after crunching the numbers the publishers will decide its worth their while to port it to MacTel.

Many of the APIs that have been incomplete in earlier versions of OS X -- I.E., unstable and going through many changes until they're frozen and can be counted on -- have been in the areas games depend on most (graphics, sound, etc.), and its taken its toll. There are benefits to a regular dose of Teh Shiney™, but there are benefits to having a solid stable of legacy software also, but of course we're in for another big transition phase with MacTel... Tradeoffs are such a bitch, and Shiney is rarely free.

Anywho, we were talking about Casino games, and I've put it off as long as I could. All of them kind of sucked after playing with Freeverse's kit, in that "I know this was a Carbon port, but you could have at least redesigned the icon larger than its original 32 pixels in OS 9 so I don't see something horrid when I command+tab" kind of way, but one was suckier above all others.

If Apple was within their rights to ask people not to develop for their platform, these guys would be at the top of the list.

The game actually starts out innocently enough. The icon sucks, but more in a "I know I'm supposed to use something like a photo for an icon, but didn't read the rest about orientation, contrast, or it not looking like an amorphous blob in the dock." sorta way. It's well known Apple uses their printouts of the HIG to shave their toilet paper budget now, and I've used great apps with the standard default icon, so this wasn't the blow to my confidence in its promise that it might be for others.

I'm going to spare you the intro screen, and drop you straight into what passes for the menu..

Do click to see it in all its glory, because reducing it improves it, and do notice the freak back at that roulette wheel showing off the completely whacked out dress code. If I were a blackjack dealer forced to wear a bowtie and the guy running the roulette wheel got to come in wearing that, I'd be pissed. In fairness, the dealer probably has bigger worries, like the fact that he has no legs.

We'll come back to the bartender.

Obviously this is either someone with a 3-D package gone awry, or the fact that no one casts or is affected by shadows means its a den of vampires. It's a horrifyingly crappy casino scene, but if it was just ugly I wouldn't bother.

Note the slider at the bottom left: This is how you navigate pan the bar to see the different areas you can click into. It's like the worst of hypercard meets the worst of Macromedia Director, and it only gets worse if you pan...

Basically a filler scene until we get to the other area of the game where you can do anything, but it was interesting to see are no shelves behind the bar, so who the fuck knows what he's serving. At the far end, you have what appears to be a high roller club...

I was unable to access the high roller club, as I only played a round in each of the games. I want to talk about the bowtie on the 14 year old bouncer, which I'm 90% sure was painted on, but feel the crappiness of the graphics at this stage is self-evident.

You do miss a little of the whole effect in the screenshot: I.E., the fan twirls, but nothing else moves. And those floors. It's fucking creepy, but we'll move onto actual gameplay.

Since I did download it primarily for Blackjack, its worth starting off with it...

Up until now, the interface had sucked, but the interface for actually playing a game takes it to a whole other level.

You have to move the mouse down to that little floating slider box in the bottom right, click and hold on a number, and then drag it to the yellow circle in the middle. Then you wait, and the computer seems to arbitrarily decide its time to deal a hand. In order to tell it to hit or stand on your cards, you have to use a mouse gesture.

I.E., you have to slide the mouse up and down in succession, or left and back to right movement in succession. This would almost be pioneering in theory if it didn't completely and totally suck on so many fucking levels in practice, and I'm almost in awe that the developer wasn't able to realize how unplayable the game actually is.

You don't even want to see what happens when the cards are dealt, I couldn't make heads or tails of what the hell was going on and didn't finish a hand. Of course this casino did offer roulette, which I had to check out...

Oh, it's bad. Not as bad as the Blackjack interface in practice, because here you are just dragging some chips over and listening to some downright terrible and constant voice over work. However, once the droning voice says betting is closed, you're exposed to this image -- which is animated -- for a second or so.

You can kinda tell its spinning in the game, but really just barely, and if you look its basically just slapping it over the betting interface for a second and then sliding it up, and you don't know its landed on until it goes away. Hypercard doesn't exist for OS X, so it can't be that, but maybe he's taken advantage of SuperCard being ported.

I hope not, because HyperCard was cool in its way.

I mentioned we'd get back to the bartender, if you click on him at the 'Main Menu' you get... this:

You may remember this from 1992, when people thought it would be awesome to have computers chat to you in a game. The only problem was no one had a fucking clue how to do it in serious AI research well, let alone for a $20 casino game.

So every developer gave up, and added a text field where what you entered was parsed and patched against keywords. You could say whatever you wanted, but if the computer saw the string "Hello" in your sentence, it would match it to a canned response. If it didn't match anything, you'd get a canned "Um.." response. The easiest way to spot it is to throw out a swear word first thing, as there are always canned responses for swear words.

The developer just knows you're going to want to see how it reacts, so they are going to have matches for swear words and -- in some above and beyond cases, swear phrases -- and the length they go to be clever in the response can be telling.

Now, back in 1992, people figured out that this was novel the first time you saw it in a game, and even fun for about 60 seconds. Everyone except this guy, and to make matters worse his chat system seems to only recognize "Hello" and "Hi" and various forms of swearing.

And for the love of gawd -- please take this to heart -- unless you're Jenna Jameson and your app is targeting an entirely different market, do not include your visage in your software.

Very few of us are attractive enough that we're what you'd want to see every time you launch an app, and even fewer appreciate the frugal value of a haircut via flowbee.

Nothing good can come of it.

And yes, the flowbee knock is kind of low, and if I met the guy in person I wouldn't care a whit about what he looked like, but you have to remember what you're doing when you do this.

You're envisioning the software as an extension of yourself (megalomania, which we're all guilty of to an extent, but this is an Nth degree), which might be fine if the software is fantastic, but is just setting your mug up if the experience is less than pleasant. Not even Steve Jobs or Bill Gates make their computers boot up with their visage staring at you.

Here's the thing: presentation isn't everything unless you don't deliver.

It's not about the guy, it's about the image of whoever that guy is right there in the focal point. Presentation is the lens through which you take in something, whether it be food or software, and if you coat crap in candy a lot of people will swallow it.

Unless they bite down, in which case the candy helps a hell of a lot to soften the foul taste. When you're coating the crap in arsenic, everything about it becomes hated, especially the mug whose eyes -- and I swear to god -- seem to follow you as you pan the view.

And actually, it wouldn't really be fine even if the software kicked ass, because you still have to deal with associations. I.E., if someone came to the site and saw the white russian at the top, and had gotten deathly drunk from them when they had turned 21, they might not have the most positive subconscious response while trawling my words. If someone had them on their 21st and it was a fantastic experience, they might get a warm fuzzy before they ever get to reading the words.

If I was a short nerdy white guy with ears to give phobias about updrafts and the refined visual palate of Helen Keller, there'd be no problem. I'd completely identify and gravitate into Tiger Pub's field, but since I'd argue I'm not at least one of those things, we have a problem.

Everyone brings their own frame of reference -- their experience in life and what they know -- to what they approach, and as a software developer this is something you have to taken into account when you're designing your app. If someone who isn't about as white as a man could be was opening that software for the first time, their reaction is going to be different than if it was someone of their own race.

Not necessarily positive or negative, but there's little point in taking the risk when the gain is going to be so negligible.

And this is where we go back to those gestures I pointed out during blackjack, because associations and frames of reference are one of the most important things to keep in mind when it comes to designing software. Now, mouse gestures have started to pop up in other areas of software, like browsers or OS-add ons. I.E., you might make a movement with the mouse to make your browser go back, or forwards, or reload. Some people swear by them, and there's nothing wrong with having them in as an option: That's cool.

However, making your web browser only work via mouse gestures would be a really bad idea, because 99% of the people who first try to use it aren't going to expect it to work that way. Put it in as an option and try to sell them on it, but if you try to get users to jump right to it, even if it works well it probably just "Just won't feel right." They'll get frustrated, sometimes not knowing why, but they'll know its your software doing it.

Even when Apple dropped the floppy drive, they made damn sure you could get an external one via USB.

Time and time again, I run into developers that want to do things differently in their app than how people are used to, or the way the competition does it, and nine times out of ten their reasoning for it has very little to do with the user. It usually has much more with being different than the rest or working the way they prefer it.

There's nothing wrong with that in theory -- it's their app -- but coincidentally, eight times out of ten the users are just annoyed, with the rest being split between loving it and ambivalent. So this really only matters if someone cares if others want to use their app.

If you do care whether or not people use your app, and you're faced with the decision of breaking from the way the rest of the pack does things, I'd ask you to consider how beneficial to the user using it it will actually be, and if you decide it will be beneficial, will be enough to outweigh the experience with other apps they're coming in with.

And for gods sake, if you feel you absolutely must include your mug front and center in your app or site somewhere -- because it's all personable in the same way that those used car guys always have to do their own commercials -- at least:

1. Don't wear a tightly-patterned plaid shirt.

2. Make sure your app is serious quality, because if someone bites down and gets a nasty mouthful and your mug is right there, you're screwed.

Actually, just worry about #2 down the line.

Even I, short on sleep and low on coffee, feel a bit like an asshole for going off of this guy's work in such a heavy way. I get that he probably poured a ton of time and love into it, and I'm equally sure his mom and friends think its the best game ever, and that it represents at least three nights of work when he could have been out partying.

He's probably a great guy to hang out with, and as a satire of 1991 he would have made a rabid fan eagerly awaiting his take on the later "Edutainment" era: Where this rounds the horn is that he's charging for it.

Dare to dream -- I'm all about encouraging the small developers to go for it -- but if you're blind and going hunting, take a friend who can see because you're sure as hell not going to notice the orange vests. I'd certainly feel bad if the guy's feelings were hurt at my butchering his app, just not as bad as if someone actually bought it.

It doesn't appear to be limited to the Mac anymore either, as I saw a Windows preview on the site, although none of it looks to be worked on that heavily. I was even more disturbed by the icons for the upcoming "Tiger's Eye Casino" and "Tiger's Eye Resort", which means it's growing as a franchise.

Equally disturbing are the links on the front of their website to their other games, KTA Tennis and an update to their KGA Golf. I downloaded KGA Golf, and well, this post isn't big enough for my thoughts on it, so I'll let the developer notes for the new feature in the update speak for me:

"Long-standing Out of Bounds bug now fixed - courses that displayed "Out of Bounds" even when the ball was clearly in-bounds are now fixed"

From what I can tell, the previous update occurred a little less than a year before, and brought with it such advancements as being able to toggle sound effects on and off. There's something on the the site called "The Fishin' Hole" which I'm in abject fear of, and dare anyone to try.

On rare occasions, bad taste, bad technology and poor implementation can combine into something truly unholy. It may or may not be the worst game on the platform shipping right now -- or any platform -- but they must be stopped before they discover Dashboard widgets.

[ Worst casino game ever ]

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    August 23, 2005, at 01:39 PM